Brendan O'Neill is editor of the online magazine spiked and is a columnist for the Big Issue in London and The Australian in, er, Australia. His satire on environmentalism, Can I Recycle My Granny and 39 Other Eco-Dilemmas, is published by Hodder & Stoughton. He doesn't
tweet.

Comparing Obama's drone attacks in Pakistan to the shooting at Sandy Hook is the most infantile kind of anti-imperialism

I am opposed to President Obama's drone attacks in Pakistan. I was against the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Hell, I even opposed Tony Blair's bombing of Yugoslavia in 1999, which made me deeply unpopular with my liberal friends, liberals then being the most fervent bangers of the drums of war. Yet despite all that, I find myself a repulsed by an argument that has floated like a determined turd to the surface of radical commentary over the past week – namely that the school shooting in Sandy Hook is not that different from what America does overseas.

Such infantile agitation brings to mind Kevin the Teenager ("You're all so evil!") more than it does any serious anti-imperialist writers or activists from the past. It replaces a principled moral objection to wars overseas with a morally relativistic treatment of every firing of a gun as part of the same spectrum of badness. Perhaps gun-toting criminals will start using these arguments in their defence: "I'm not to blame, your honour. It was the culture of shooting that made me do it." Certainly the claim that the Sandy Hook massacre was "but part and parcel" of a culture created by American leaders implicitly lets Adam Lanza, the shooter, off the hook.

The commentators who contrast the reaction to Sandy Hook with the reaction to drone strikes have come up with a catch-all explanation for the Western public's demonic double standards – apparently we have been "trained" to see Muslims as less than human and thus we're not bothered when Pakistanis die. According to Glenn Greenwald, the US elite has used "deranged" rhetoric when discussing Muslims in recent years, and this derangement has rubbed off on the wide-eyed populace. "Citizens of a militaristic empire are inexorably trained to adopt the mentality of their armies", he says, which means Americans buy into "anti-Muslim dehumanisation". Not all Americans, of course. A brave band of enlightened peaceniks who refuse to watch Fox News and who totally love Jon Stewart are seemingly immune to this top-down "training" in racial hatred. Strip away the anti-imperialist pretensions of these ostentatious Left-wing displays of concern for Pakistani children, and it's clear this is really about demonstrating that one is possessed of higher moral sensitivities than the average brainwashed American.

The crass ruminations on the alleged inability of ordinary Westerners to feel empathy for foreign brown people overlook a key difference between Newtown and rural parts of Pakistan: Newtown isn’t a war zone, whereas parts of Pakistan sadly are. And war zones are governed by very different rules and moral codes to non-war zones. Indeed, war zones come into existence as a result of the collapse of rules, of normal politics and law, when conflicts can only be resolved through the last resort of violence. This radically alters what is seen as morally acceptable. Killing, whether intentional or accidental, is seen as an accepted part of war. War is a special situation, in which the morality of everyday life, which most of us live by or aspire to live by, no longer holds. Even so, if a US soldier did what Adam Lanza did, he'd be arrested in a flash – indeed, a soldier is currently on trial, and faces the death penalty, for allegedly carrying out the Kandahar massacre.

Newtown, by contrast, is a run-of-the-mill town that is not in a state of war. This means that horrific violence is experienced as an extraordinary violation of the moral code, a violent ripping apart of the social fabric that wraps around people's everyday lives and interactions. It is the height of infantile Leftish posturing to ask why people seem "disproportionately" shocked by the Sandy Hook attack. It's because, quite rightly, those who live in generally non-violent, democratic communities expect adherence to a certain standard of moral behaviour, and when their expectations are brutally mown down, they reel back in horror. It isn't that Americans don't care about Pakistanis, but rather that they believe, quite legitimately, that war situations are morally different to non-war normality.

If anti-war observers want to campaign for an end to America's treatment of parts of Pakistan as a war zone, thus precipitating a move back to normal moral rules in that country, good on them, go for it. But I wish they’d spare us the eye-swivelling stupidity of the question "Why is killing seen as acceptable in a war but not in an American infant school?", which is in essence, and ridiculously, what they're asking.